Google begins to phase out cookies

Google started phasing out the use of cookies on its Chrome browser yesterday, a move that both impacts the ~$600 billion/year online advertising industry and starts beef with Cookie Monster.

For those unfamiliar, browser cookies are a piece of tech that logs the activity of internet users across websites so that advertisers can serve them more targeted and relevant ads. Consumer advocates argue cookies invade user privacy because they can be used to compile detailed profiles, including sensitive information such as a person’s medical history.

Other browsers have already said goodbye to cookies. Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari browsers both eliminated cookies around 2020. But Chrome accounts for ~65% of internet traffic worldwide – making it ~3x as popular as Safari, the next most widely used browser – meaning its changes will have a much greater and far-reaching impact on the online advertising industry.

• Google’s broad idea to replace cookies is to relay anonymized browsing data to advertisers so they can then target specific user cohorts (sorry, Mark Cuban).
• But less personalized targeting data could lead to lower-performing ads, which in turn lowers ad prices. Both Firefox and Safari saw lower ad prices after restricting cookies.

👀 Looking ahead… Google is currently running a limited test to restrict cookies for 1% of its users, and plans to roll these changes out to everyone by the end of the year.